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Monday, September 30, 2013

Moribund Mondays

Let’s face it, Mondays are
literally the worst. Doesn’t matter if you’re a student or a workin gal or guy,
there is nothing worse than the feeling of dread we experience as Sunday draws
to a close and we wonder what fresh hell awaits us in the coming week.

In the spirit of these
cheerful reflections, I decided to invent a book blogging event called Moribund
Mondays. Why did I settle on “moribund”? In sooth, I am not sure. I wanted to
do an alliterative meme that would capture the agony of Mondays, and the word
moribund just popped into my head. I’ll admit, I wasn’t completely sure what moribund
even meant until a few moments ago when I Googled it. I had a feeling it wasn’t
exactly a positive descriptor, but that was the extent of my knowledge. For
those of you who, like me, have long since forgotten the majority of your SAT
vocab words, I present MORIBUND (courtesy of Merriam-Webster):

mor·i·bund (adj.):

being in the state of dying : approaching death

being in a state of inactivity or
obsolescence

Examples of MORIBUND:

an actor who is trying to revive
his moribund career

The peace talks are moribund.

Because I am not a completely
glass-half-empty type of person, I thought we could use this Moribund Monday to
discuss a book we’ve recently read wherein a moribund character manages to
overcome his or her moribundity (not a real word, sadly), whether in the literal sense
(e.g., a character on his/her death bed who makes a stunning recovery) or more
abstractly.

A quintessentially moribund
character that immediately comes to my mind is Julian Carax in Carlos Ruin
Zafón’s The Shadow of the Wind, which
I read this summer.

WARNING: THIS IS KIND OF
SPOILERY.

The young Carax is full of promise.
He is a brilliant novelist and he has secured the love of a beautiful lady. Unfortunately,
he is barely out of grade school when everything he holds dear in life is systematically
ripped away from him. He loses the will to write, if not to live, and for the
next couple decades plummets into a state of deep despair. Physically, he is
disfigured and sickly; mentally, he is unhinged. He is pretty much the
definition of moribund. But then through a sequence of incredible events, which
I will be vague about so as to not completely spoil this book for you, he
manages to pull himself out of this sad state and turn his life around. Hooray!

Like Carax, I feel pretty
moribund these days when it comes to my writing. I keep saying to myself, WRITE
YOUR NOVEL. But I remain inactive, moribund. Here’s hoping it doesn’t take disfigurement and several near-death experiences to snap me out of it, amiright??!

What characters have inspired
you with their ability to cease being moribund??

5 comments:

Moribund? Seriously?! It's Septemberr 30 lass. Last day of the US Government's fiscal year. First day of the rest of yer life. Buck up. It's a gloroius day. One for the ages. We have won the day. We few. We happy few.